Kingfisher (18 page)

“She's mad at me, too.”

“Only by default. You're with us.”

Pierce started to reply, didn't. He had no idea any longer what their mother might do or not do. He watched Leith, who was hidden from the basilisk's eye by a long moving van. He reached the end of it, and the strange, upright coils of the snake's body rippled suddenly. Its head turned almost completely sideways, staring down at the man walking toward it, visible now beside a small convertible with its top down. The driver, in the shadow of the beast's oddly tilted head, dropped his cell and tried to crawl under the dash.

“That is the weirdest combination of creatures imaginable,” Val said, wonderstruck anew. “A variation of the feathered serpent, maybe? I wonder if it crows.”

“I think,” Pierce said uneasily, “we're about to find out.”

The huge beak was opening wide above Leith. Weapons
appeared in open windows: Wyvern's Eyes, hunting rifles, bows. Leith shouted something; so did the man with the bullhorn. Leith moved to the middle of the empty lane, walked down it in full view of the basilisk. Behind him, cars stopped in the middle of their turns, transfixed by the knight on foot challenging the monster on top of the fire engine. One of the trucks let out an ear-piercing wail, an effort to distract it, Pierce guessed. Val moved impulsively from behind the line of vehicles to walk behind his father. The snake's coils shuddered again all down the long body. The rooster beak answered the fire truck with a fierce, shrill cross between a rooster crow and a snake's hiss that must have shaken windows all along the highway. Then it caught sight of Pierce emerging behind his brother.

The basilisk's beak opened again. It made no sound this time. It enveloped Leith in a cloud of breath that was black, completely opaque, and stank of such acrid bitterness that a flock of starlings flying overhead rained down suddenly among the fire trucks.

The whiff Pierce caught made him gag, forced tears into his eyes. He heard children screaming and crying, people coughing and cursing all around him. He moved blindly, bumped into Val, who was bent over and throwing up his lunch. Pierce wiped his burning eyes with his sleeve, blinked vision desperately back into them, taking in dry, shallow breaths through his mouth.

When he could finally see again, the basilisk had vanished, leaving its cloud of appalling breath for the sea winds to shred. The body of his father, his blurred eyes told him, lay motionless on the road.

Pierce staggered toward him, still hearing sobs, moans, convulsive noises all around him. Those nearest the basilisk were dazed, hunched over and stumbling into the trucks, or tripping over one another. No one had yet come to the aid of the fallen knight. Pierce reached Leith finally, dropped to his knees. He put a hand on Leith's chest, felt his heartbeat, then the breath move through him. Val staggered next to him, sagged down. He couldn't speak; he queried Pierce with a bloodshot stare.

“He's breathing,” Pierce told him. “I don't see anything broken or bleeding. I think he just fainted.”

“Felled by the basilisk's breath,” Val muttered hoarsely. “He'll never live that down.” He held Leith's shoulder, shook him gently. “Father? Are you in there? It's safe. The beast is gone. Come back. Sir Leith Duresse. We need you. Please come back.”

Leith showed no signs of doing so. Val gave Pierce another haggard glance, then looked around helplessly at the still-afflicted fire crew.

A shadow fell over Leith. Pierce raised his head and found the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life standing over them.

She was speaking, he realized belatedly, still half-stunned, as flowers, pearls, jewels, fell from her full, rose-petal lips.

“My house is just up that drive.” She motioned toward a palatial estate on the cliff above them. “We've been watching the excitement from our deck. My driver can help you carry him to my car. The drive is clear of traffic, and he can wait for the paramedics in my guest room. I think it would
be much quicker than waiting for an ambulance trying to get through this. Will you let us help you?”

Val was trying to tell him something, Pierce sensed. His wide-eyed, insistent gaze, his two-handed grip on their father, his alert, motionless warrior's stance, all spoke, all said the last thing Pierce wanted to hear.

Pierce said, “Yes.”

D
aimon rode through the streets of Severluna, paying no attention to where he was going. Where didn't matter anymore: every street would take him there.

“Our world,” his great-aunt told him, “is always just a step away from anywhere. Don't bother looking for it. You are already there in your heart.”

That much was true: he felt the moon-tug of that realm, the tidal pull of it overwhelming the kingdom of the wyvern, until very little of that world seemed important any longer. He lost the need of it, except in necessary ways: the place he went for clothes and food; the place where he was occasionally expected to appear, talk to faces that he remembered vaguely, in a dreamlike fashion. As in dreams, they were losing predictability; he was losing hold of their past. He saw them as from a distance: the queen who had never been his mother, the king who looked at him through wyvern's eyes and knew nothing
of the raven, the princess who fretted over him but no longer knew him, anything about him at all.

He had thought that the fay realm of Ravenhold was a dream; he learned that Wyvernhold was the unreal world. Its magic had fragmented; few possessed it. Every moment of its days was time-bound, counted, measured; the end of time was not forever, but death, and death waited everywhere, in every shadow.

“Silly way to live,” Morrig said. “What's the point of being so tidy you can't see beyond the rules you've made for everything? Look at this world instead.” He could see it now, as she and Vivien and his mother had taught him: the lovely, timeless place hidden within the noisy, jangling, quarrelsome, troubled world where even the wyverns were nothing now except a word. “Once our true realm ran from one horizon to the other, from day to night; you could move from one end to the other with a wish. A step. What Sylvester Skelton calls his magic flamed in every blade of grass, every flowering tree. Now, time gets in the way. It scattered us; we withered in it, even those of us closest to being human. The world of the wyvern king trampled us without even knowing we exist. We need our cauldron to remake our world. Find it.”

“Find it,” his mother pleaded.

“Find it,” Vivien said, always with a kiss, “for us.”

“Where are you these days?” his father asked, startling Daimon on his way out. No one really knew him anymore, so why would anyone pay attention to what he did? “You drift in and out like a ghost; your body is here, but your eyes never are. And then you vanish entirely, and I think you've followed the path of the questing knight. Then you're
back; you've gone nowhere at all, except that you've never left the place you think you come home from.” Daimon, his mind in the wyvern's world at that moment, saw the wariness in his father's eyes. “Who is she?”

“No one,” Daimon told him, feeling the long, powerful flow and drag on his heart, the summons of the invisible on the verge of becoming visible if he took that step, that leap. “I'll get over it,” he added, absently, words his father wanted to hear. “Just give me time.”

As he learned how to see into that timeless place, he learned more of its past.

It was a piecemeal process: he never knew what he would see, or when it might have happened; as in dreams, there was no past, only now.

He parked his bike at a crossroad, took a step, and Severluna vanished. The broad meadow where the Calluna River found its way into light surrounded him. What he thought was the sun flashed on the horizon. But his shadow lay in front of him; a twin sun above him illumined the vast flow of green around him. The second star on the horizon was rich bronze-gold; it pulsed with a clamor of hammering that echoed across the plain. Great black flocks of ravens swirled up and out of the glow, as though somehow they had been forged within its fires. Everything—the genial sky, the flowering grass, the earth itself—seemed to emit a low, sweet hum he could feel reverberating through the ground, up into his veins and sinews. He stood rapt, a note the earth sang.

At the corner of another street, he stepped into night, and saw the source of the second sun. It was the cauldron he had seen before, under the familiar tree. The woman he
remembered stirred the shining liquid within it with her great wooden spoon; this time she sang that pure, constant hum. So bright the cauldron was that it blotted out the stars. The moon, awash with its light, was a faint, thin pair of bronze horns tilted above the tree.

A procession made its way from night into light: four women carrying a long bronze shield with a dead man lying upon it. He had no eyes; there was a bloody hole where his heart should have been. Following him, a man carried a spear that wept blood; another held a knife, its blade curved like the moon in the tree.

The woman stirring the pot raised the bowl of her spoon, poured the molten liquid over the blind face. Then she gestured.

The women raised the shield, tilted it, and the body of the fallen warrior slid, disappeared into the cauldron.

“That's what you want me to find?” Daimon asked Vivien, who was suddenly on the sidewalk beside him, surrounded by endlessly moving bodies dodging around them.

“Yes,” she said. “But after being in time all these—well, however long—we don't know exactly what it will look like. You'll recognize it as we would.” She smiled; her palm rested briefly on his heart. “Here.”

“Did the warrior come back to life? Or did he get eaten?”

Her mouth crooked; she answered patiently, “He was drinking beer and toasting the moon an hour later.”

“Are you certain my heart is big enough for this?”

“I'm certain that your heart will grow large enough to take that great power when it reveals itself to you. As it will. You are the raven's son.”

He rode in a daze, found himself back on the palace grounds. He got off his bike, walked it behind the sanctum tower to the royal garages, where he found a woman crouched on the floor beside her bike and wielding a wrench.

She rose swiftly when she recognized him.

“Prince Daimon.”

She looked familiar: those long bones, the honey-colored hair, that height. Standing, they were eye to eye, and suddenly he remembered.

“Dame Scotia. You were the black knight who forced me to yield to you.”

She smiled; that, too, he remembered.

“It is strange,” she commented, “not knowing who you're fighting. In tales, it seems romantic: the nameless, invisible knights, the shining armor, the great swords. That's why I took to it. In truth, it's stifling and awkward, lumbering around wearing all that weight and trying to see out of a slit in your helm.”

“You made yourself good at it.”

She shrugged lightly. “I had several older cousins to practice on. You made yourself good at it, as well.”

He was silent, trying to recall exactly why. His own past blurred into another; he could scarcely envision a time before he had known Vivien. Who had he been, he wondered with a strange, quick tremor of panic, before he was the raven's child?

He heard a clink, blinked, and saw Dame Scotia bending to pick up the wrench she had dropped. He saw her, he realized, as he saw no one else those days. Perhaps only because she was a stranger, and therefore not tediously predictable.

He shook his head a little, settling a bewildering stir of thought.

“Anything I can help with?” he asked.

“Just tightening this and that, Prince Daimon. Making sure things don't fall apart. Thank you.” She smiled again, left an imprint on his mind of calm, violet eyes, an expression absurdly free of complications. “That's another thing I accidentally became good at.”

In the middle of the night he woke himself up thinking: Chimera Bay.

The words haunted him when he woke again at dawn. He didn't recall where he had heard them, or why they might be in any way important. He threw on some clothes, fended off the usual meaningless questions and conversations, and rode back in time to the one place left that made any sense to him.

This time, he found himself at Vivien's door. As always, she opened it before he knocked. He entered wordlessly. She put her arms around him and took him nowhere and everywhere at once. Memories his own and not his own drifted like richly colored dying leaves through his head; he did not know, any longer, who he was except in her enchanting eyes.

He asked his mother about his vanishing past. She had put on a hundred masks to watch him grow; she would remember.

But she did not seem interested in it, either. “That was the wyvern king's world. The place I couldn't enter unless I was disguised. I juggled colored cloth balls at your fourth birthday party; I measured you for your first formal suit. I watched you in your first tournament from a concession
stand. Glimpses of you were all my life, then.” She gave him a lovely, bittersweet smile that touched his heart. “Now I can stand here looking at your face.” She cupped it lightly with her hands. “And showing you mine. Why should I want to remember that past?”

They were in the tiny village called Ravensley, sitting at a sturdy wooden table in the cottage that Vivien's apartment sometimes mysteriously became. She was out in one world or the other. Ana had poured tea in the pot on the table; neither of them drank it. The village was a place of shallow dimensions, Daimon sensed, like its photograph. He had never seen another cottage door open or anyone walking on the street. In a place beyond eyesight, it held villagers, tourists, traffic of every kind. In this moment, this memory, it held only an open door, a table, a teapot, no voices but their own.

Morrig entered then, glanced around for another chair, and there it was, along with another teacup. Daimon watched her guardedly, aware now of the power she hid behind her dithering ways.

“Tea,” she remarked, gazing into the cup. “Why never brandy? What is Chimera Bay?”

She looked questioningly at Daimon; he tried to grasp a slippery recollection, not easy in a place that seemed to be somebody else's fraying memory. For some reason the queen's lover, Leith Duresse, surfaced.

“I woke last night,” he explained, “and the words were in my head.”

“I know,” Morrig said. “I heard them, and I wondered.” She linked her fingers, clad in lacy, fingerless gloves, beneath her chin and regarded him out of mist-colored eyes older
than Wyvernhold. “Try,” she suggested gently, and it came: supper on the day of the Assembly, Leith sitting beside his newfound son, Pierce Oliver, who was explaining something to the king, and to Sylvester Skelton.

“A fish fry?” Daimon said. “Can that be right?”

“Chimera Bay is a fish fry?”

“The fish fry is in Chimera Bay.” She nodded encouragingly, looking baffled, while his thoughts blundered about in the mists of her gaze, trying to see. “Friday fish fry,” he amended, then glimpsed another piece. “A ritual. Lord Skelton called it a ritual. Yes. Pierce Oliver had taken something from a ritual in Chimera Bay, involving fish. A knife, I think it was.” He hesitated, hearing fragments he had been paying little attention to, until now. “Lord Skelton seemed to make a connection between the knife, the fish fry, and Severen's sacred artifact.”

He felt wind stir through the door of the cottage, smelling of asphalt and brine. Somewhere, in the past or future, brakes screeched, then an owl. Morrig's attention had withdrawn so far from him or anyone, she might have been one of the cottage's memories: the old woman sitting over her tea, motionless, shrouded in shadow.

Then she raised her cup, took a sip of tea, and made a face.

“Where is Chimera Bay?”

Ana shook her head. “Somewhere north?”

“I have no idea,” Vivien said. Daimon started, and she smiled, sitting among them unexpectedly, holding her own flowered cup. “Daimon, my love, do you?”

“Not a clue.”

“What might be there,” she persisted, “to make it at all important? To us, that is? A shrine? A well?”

“A place,” Ana said more clearly, “that might hold our past? Anything of Calluna's?”

“I don't know,” he said helplessly, and added, “I could ask Lord Skelton.”

“You could,” Morrig said, “just go there and see what you see. Be a questing knight. Take a look. You know yourself well enough by now to recognize what might be important to us.” He looked mutely at Vivien, appalled at the idea, wondering how she could expect him to leave her and go off searching for a fish fry in the nether regions of Wyvernhold.

“Come with me?” he pleaded. She reached across the table for his hand, gripped it tightly.

“I can't travel with you,” she said gently. “Not openly. None of us can. It would attract attention, especially from the king and his magus, who have their eyes on you already. Lord Skelton might begin to think too much and discover us. We must have that cauldron back first.” She raised his fingers to her cheek, her brows crooked. “But don't worry. We will never be far from you. No farther than it takes for you to find me now. Do this for me?”

Reluctantly, later, he nerved himself to enter the vast, dusty, overwhelmingly packed rooms of the Royal Library to look for maps. The older the better, he decided, since no modern map would have anything to do with Ravenhold. He needed one map to pinpoint Chimera Bay, which he was not entirely sure how to spell, and another, the oldest he could find, to look for words, place names, that, like fossil footprints, might indicate the values of a forgotten realm.

He got vague directions from a librarian and wandered
through collisions of architectural styles, as rooms expanded through the centuries to admit new collections. A map framed on a far wall beckoned; he followed its summons and found himself in a room so cluttered with moldering tomes that it made him sneeze.

Near him, an elbow slid off the page of a tome and hit the table hard. A head, haloed with sunlight from stained glass, turned toward him as the elbow's owner rubbed it. They gazed at one another with surprise.